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If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon-Mary Higgins Clark, say- and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel "Moonlight Becomes You," the top line on the page said, " 'Moonlight Becomes You' and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle-Amazon's new wireless reading device. Learn more." Below the picture of Clark's physical pa- perback ($ 7.99) was another teaser: "Start reading 'Moonlight Becomes You' on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get yours here." If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of "Moonlight Becomes You" ($6.39), it wouldn't offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered. Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important- that it was an alpenhorn blast of post- Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he'd been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kin- dle's free 3G hookup with Sprint wire- less-they call it Whispemet-he was well into Chapter 1 ofZadie Smith's "On Beautj' ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor- in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he'd been doing all his rec- reational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a "fundamentally better experience" than inked paper did. "Jeff Bezos"-Amazon's founder and C.E.O.-"has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution," Weisberg said. "Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence." Lots of ordinary people were excited about the Kindle 2, too--there were then about fifteen hundred five-star customer reviews at the Kindle Store, saying "I love my Kindle" over and over, and only a few hundred bitter one-stars. Kindle books were clean. "I've always been creeped out by library books and used books," one visitor, Christine Ring, wrote on the Amazon Web site. "You never know where theyve been!" "It has reinvigorated my interest in reading," another reviewer said. "I'm hooked," another said. "If I dropped my kindle down a sewer, I would buy another one immediately." And the unit was selling: in April, tech blogs had rumors that three hun- dred thousand Kindle 2s had shipped since the release date of February 24th. Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders: "Kindle sales have exceeded our most op- timistic expectations." He went on "The Daily Show" and laughed. (See the Y ou- Tube video called 'JeffBezos Laughing Freakishly Loud on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.") Amazon's page showed a woman in sunglasses sitting on a beach with a Kin- dle over her knee. Below that were video testimonials from big-name writers like Michael Lewis and Toni Morrison, re- cycled from the launch of the original Kindle, in the fall of 2007. James Patter- son, the force behind a stream of No. 1 Times best-sellers, said that he enjoyed reading outdoors, where he had, he confided, a "wonderful back yard, nice pool, and all that." Patterson was pleased to discover, while Kindling poolside, that the wind didn't make the book's pages fl " Th '. th " h utter. ere s Just e one page, e ex- plained. Neil Gaiman had moved from skeptic to "absolute believer." Well, well! I began to have the mildly euphoric feeling that you get ten minutes into an infomercial. Sure, the Kindle is